


All I Need (Is A Good Friend)

by squireofgeekdom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Pre-War (Transformers), Ratchet needs a break, Roller is a good friend, in which the author inflicts their own academic anxiety on ratchet (i'm so sorry)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-30 23:52:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15762309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squireofgeekdom/pseuds/squireofgeekdom
Summary: Ratchet is buried in exam review and forgets he'd made plans to meet up with Roller; Roller makes it work anyway.





	All I Need (Is A Good Friend)

**Author's Note:**

> Title paraphrased from the Cloud Cult song.

Ratchet stares at gibberish.

It’s not gibberish. It’s a perfectly sound medical textbook, with perfectly sound questions in its practice exam section. 

But right now, it’s gibberish. 

He reads the question for a fifth time, hoping this time he’ll recognize what the  _ hell  _ it’s talking about. 

It doesn’t.

“ _ Fuck. _ ” He says, a little louder than he means to.

His door chimes, and he jumps. 

He wasn’t expecting anyone. Was he expecting anyone? 

When he pulls up his internal chronometer, it’s later than he expected - he’s lost hours to damned  _ gibberish  _ and he can’t even think what he’s got out of it at all. He hasn’t logged anything on his internal calendar, but on his way to the door he digs out the pad he most frequently scribbles notes on from his subspace - there, that’s today, two days before the Exam, a ‘R’ - with an  _ exclamation point. _

Shit.

He opens the door to Roller, and from the look on Roller’s face when he sees Ratchet, he must look about as fucking awful as he feels. 

“Roller, I’m so sorry, I completely forgot you were back today, I’m -” As he lets Roller walk past him into his apartment, he realizes that the explanation is already evident, his desk is a mess of pads and discarded cubes of high-energy energon, the rest of the room is no less chaotic. “I’m - fuck, we were going to go out, weren’t we?”

They’d planned it when he’d last been sent out, that they’d go out when he got back - he’d had this date for  _ months, _ he’d just completely forgotten that it would fall so close to exams. 

Ratchet surveys the crumbling kingdom of med student hell that is everything around him, and presses the heel of his hand to his helm, like he can knock more processing capacity back into his brain. “Shit.”

“Welcoming as ever, Ratch.”

“Fuck. Sorry.”

Roller just holds out an arm, tugs Ratchet in for a hug by way of proper greeting. Roller always makes him feel small, his own arms can barely make it to Roller’s sides, but Roller’s hug makes the world seem marginally less terrible.

“So,” Roller starts, after he lets Ratchet go. 

Ratchet sighs, staring around the room, his processor helpfully reminding him that the Exam is in less than 48 hours, and the shambling piles of datapads on his desks reminding him of all the chapters he hasn’t reviewed, and the ache in his optics reminding him that he’s more exhausted than he has reason to be, given that it’s still hours yet before he’d usually sleep. 

“I -” he starts, and Roller looks at him expectantly. “I’m sorry, Roller, I - I really shouldn’t go out tonight, I’m just - I’m going to be shit company, and - and I really need to be studying.”

“Yeah, I’m sure your studying’s been real productive tonight,” Roller says, looking around at his desk, and yeah, his swearing earlier must have been. Well. Significantly louder than he’d thought. “When’s the last time you’ve had a break?”

“When’s the last time  _ you’ve _ had a break?” Ratchet says. “C’mon, Roller, this is the first time you’ve had off in ages, there’s - you’ve - you’ve got other folks you were going to meet up with. Y’gotta take advantage of it. Don’t worry about me.” He adds, “things - things will be less crazy after this. I swear I’ll be better company on your next leave.”

Roller looks at him skeptically. “‘Fresher still in the same place?” 

“Yeah -” Ratchet points through his bedroom into the fresher. As Roller steps out, Ratchet frantically tries to create some order in the shambles of his desk. 

He drops a datapad when he is picked up, clean into the air, one of the heavy blankets that he’d left on his slab folded around him. 

Roller rolls him up in the blanket, his arms neatly pinned, his head poking out.

“Roller!” Ratchet starts, “Roller, put me down.”

“Nope,” Roller says cheerfully. “You make too excellent of a burrito.”

“ _ Roller. _ ” Ratchet growls, to no avail. “If you strain your backstruts don’t come crying to me about it.”

“What? Nah, you’re like a couple of grapes.” Roller says, but he tosses Ratchet down into the couch with an ‘oof’ of relief. “C’mon. You’re taking a break.” He says, as Ratchet glares at him and tries to disentangle himself from the blanket - which, frankly, Roller should  _ not  _ be able to turn into such an effective pinion, it’s ridiculous.

Roller abandons him to the mercy of the couch, headed off in the direction of the kitchen. “You’re going to make me fail my exams.” He calls after him.

“No I’m not.” Roller calls back. 

“No, you’re not,” Ratchet mutters bitterly. “I’m going to fail because I’m an  _ idiot _ who was stupid enough to think he was  _ good  _ at this. Remember when I thought I was good at this?” He calls out to Roller.

“You are good at this,” Roller says, coming back out of the kitchen. 

“Yeah? Then why do all of my books read like gibberish?” He sighs. “These are preliminary exams, Roller.  _ Preliminary.  _ And I can’t even -”

Roller shrugs. “Books are wrong.” He says, poking Ratchet in the side of his helm to knock him off his derailing train of thought.

“Eh, what would you know,” He says, and then winces at how harsh that came out. 

Roller just smiles and shrugs. “C’mon. You’ll feel better after a break.” He holds out a box of energon goodies.

Ratchet wiggles in the blanket, hands still not free. “What, you gonna feed them to me?”

Roller pops one in his own mouth instead,

“C’mon, Roller, this is your first leave in months, you can’t waste time sitting inside with me, go out, have a drink -”

“Oh, I will be drinking,” Roller holds up a bottle of enjex from Ratchet’s cabinet. “You don’t have to if you still think you’re going to study after this break, but  _ I  _ certainly am.”

“Just steal all my food and drink, why don’tcha,” Ratchet grumbles without any edge, while Roller flips on the screen. “What, don’t tell me you’re going to make me sit through one of those action flicks,  _ Captain Iacon _ or whatever -”

“Pff,” Roller says, elbowing him as he sits down next to where Ratchet has been plopped on the couch. “Compromise, we can watch Legend Smashers. There’ll still be explosions.”

Ratchet grunts in vague approval. “What are they doing this episode?”

“Hmm,” Roller considers, looking at the screen. “Looks like they’re smashing the legend about one very smart Cybertronian who got it into his head that he was actually very stupid, which was blatantly untrue, but I guess they’re going to spend an episode on it -”

“Alright, alright,” Ratchet says. “They’re probably just trying to recreate stunts from one of your action flicks, anyway.”

“And you love it.” Roller says with a grin, “‘ _ ideas are tested by experiment _ ’, you say, and all that.”

Ratchet sighs, finally working an arm free to grab one of the energon goodies. “Fine. One episode.”

Roller grins.  

**Author's Note:**

> Captain Iacon is, of course, a patriotic Cybertronian superhero in red-white-and-blue who makes a heroic sacrifice and ends up out-of-time for years and years, only to reawaken in a changed future, where all his friends are gone or much older, and there are new and strange threats to face. At this particular time, Roller doesn't expect that he is going to end up relating to the character so much. 
> 
> Roller-quoting-Ratchet about how 'ideas are tested by experiment' is quoting zombie-Richard-Feynman in the xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/397/ about the earth-based show that Legends Smashers is a Very Obvious Expy Of.


End file.
